Microsoft Cloud Services

Microsoft entered in to Cloud computing with different services (like Office365, Windows Azure, Windows Intune and Microsoft Dynamics CRM) to compete with Google apps, amazon cloud, Microsoft Cloud Services are designed for targeted market and customers to fulfill their needs, let’s see how Microsoft cloud can be used in real time

Office365

Through office365, Microsoft able to provide the cloud service for day to day office work, yes the application like Microsoft office(Ms word, excel and power point) email services (Microsoft Outlook), file server service (share point) and communicator (IM), these are the basic application require a day to day office work

No need to invest for high end servers and IT infrastructure in order to provide the basic services to your employee, even you can view and edit the Microsoft office documents from browser itself, no need to install MS office locally on your desktop and it can be access anywhere through the internet

Will discuss more on this in my up coming post, please check back

Windows Azure

Normally any application, runs on server in a data center and this can be accessible from internet or intranet and applications are built on some kind of platform. ForIn-house applications, platform usually includes a programming language (.net), operating system (windows server 2008) and how it’s store data.

Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation,

Windows Azure runs on servers in Microsoft data centers. Normally Microsoft provideSoftware that you can install on your own computers, Windows Azure is a service, Customers use it to run applications and store data on Internet-accessible machines owned by Microsoft.

Using Windows Azure you can implement application on cloud and also migrate existing application to Windows Azure, through Windows Azure Microsoft able to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

You can create your own VM (virtual machine) on Windows Azure, it will only host applications running on two versions of Windows Server, it’s doesn’t support Linux or other operating systems, that’s why I call it windows as a services rather Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and also you can’t supply your own VM image for Windows Azure to run the application. Instead, the platform itself provides and maintains its own copy of Windows

Windows Intune

It’s a Cloud based PC monitoring software, you can monitor the domain based computers and workgroup based computers virtually from anywhere and even these computers not required to connect corporate network in order to get update and monitored, whether they are in the office or on the road, you can able to view the status, alerts, security policies, and more through the web console

Windows Intune client needs to be installed on the computers (require a Windows 7 system) in which you are going to monitor and require an internet connection, its best suite for small and medium environment.